Information management is becoming an increasingly critical key to the effective management of institutions and commercial enterprises. The information may relate to services, products, facilities, consumers, or staff, but it needs to be managed, moved, and accessed effectively if use of resources is to be optimized and/or profits are to be maximized.
The information needed to effectively and efficiently manage and operate a controlled environment, such as an inmate facility, may reflect the unique requirements of such a facility. There is often a need to facilitate both management of, and access to, various data with respect to a facility on a continuing basis. However, automation of management of and access to information pertaining to controlled environment facilities, and the residents therein, has been limited and integration of various different management functions has been even less prevalent.
For example, controlled environment facilities often do not have a ready means by which a new resident may be entered into (or reactivated in) a controlled environment facility management system, if such a system should happen to be in use at the facility. A police department, for example, may arrest an individual and bring that individual to a county facility for incarceration. However, entry of the individual into the controlled environment facility management system may require appreciable time, such as on the order of days. Accordingly, an investigator or other personnel may have no ability to monitor phones calls or access information regarding that individual when they are initially checked into the facility.
Moreover, there has been little, if any, interaction with respect to access of information pertaining to personal records of those confined to certain facilities. For example, due to the number and variety of systems and other sources of data used with respect to controlled environment facilities, investigators are often unable to effectively acquire, access, and analyze investigative information. An investigator may need to access a controlled environment facility management system, a gang database, a fingerprint database (e.g., an Identex machine), a public database (e.g., PublicData.com and RapSheets.com), and/or a plurality of other separate sources of information available to the investigator in order to complete a dossier or “investigative jacket” on an individual or case. The investigator may have unique user identification and passwords to access each such separate source of information, making it inconvenient and inefficient for the investigator to access desired or useful information. Moreover, the information available from these sources of information must typically be aggregated manually by the investigator. Additional useful information may exist, such as within the controlled environment facility management system of a different controlled environment facility, which the investigator is not able to access. Accordingly, useful and perhaps critical information may elude the investigator.
The problems discussed herein are compounded when Federal, State, and municipal jurisdictions are considered. For example, it is difficult, at best, for personnel at a Federal prison facility to easily obtain information on an individual's activities with respect to misdemeanors involving a local municipality. To obtain such information, a user would have to contact the local police department as well as the local court system and perhaps even the local probation department. When domestic situations occur, or when minors are involved, the problem is even more compounded in that Family Services and/or Juvenile Services might also be involved.
Currently, technology that has been deployed uses client server technology in which applications specific to one facility, or to one function within a facility, are designed. This type of system is an isolated point of technology, and solves only one isolated issue for a limited number of users. It is desired to share information on a technology level and to allow the approximately 50,000 desktop computers which now exist to access, on a controlled basis, that information without being constrained by the physical location of the computer and without being constrained by the enterprise affiliation of the computer.